As Michael’s blog explained, autonomics are all around us, both in feature implementation (e.g. a routing protocol like OSPF) as well as in architectural frameworks like GANA. But while the former has created isolated, per feature domains of autonomicity, the latter has never really resulted into a useable implementation used by a network engineer to date!

Lets go back to what we said out the vision of Autonomic Networking was going to be, as in the below figure, which I essentially repeated from my DON’T PANIC blog. The observant reader will notice that I changed the term ‘simple management tools’ into ‘SDN/NMS Controller across a simplified northbound interface’. After all we can’t ignore markets trends like SDN.

The vision remains the same whether you use an iPAD versus a super-duper controller though: you ingest a network wide behavior into the network, as we can model the totality of the network in an abstract, location-independent, network-wide manner. Autonomic Processes turn this network wide behavior into local state, and might invoke control loops between nodes to do this effectively. This ultimately results into the good-ole legacy network protocols to become self-managing, without changing the protocols themselves. Genius! But how do we get there in practice? And can customers trust us to do the right thing from day 1? Read More »

It’s that time of the year again – time for some computer and human networking at Cisco Live Milan! This year I’m taking the unusual and somewhat risky step of blogging about the network infrastructure before the event. This is because we’re going to try something interesting for the networking folks. We are going to try and get rid of the Legacy IP, otherwise known as IPv4.

Before you get too worried – no, the dual stack network setup does not disappear. Lots of critical parts of our everyday lives still need the old and proven protocol to successfully operate, so removing it would be irresponsible to say the least. But some of you may be interested to try (in a controlled fashion) exactly how strong the ties to the old good legacy. If you are one of these people, this post is for you – because this blog entry is one of the few places, if not the only one, to find the IPv6-only SSID name and access credentials.

First of all, what’s the big deal with IPv6-only access network, wasn’t this tried before?

Sure, it is not all new. The first time we tried an IPv6-only network was at IPv6 World Congress conference in Paris, early spring 2012. We also had an IPv6-only SSID in one of the Cisco Live US conferences. We discovered that the subset of the operating systems that could successfully operate in this kind of environment was pretty small. But as time passed, evidence suggests the situation was slowly improving. Read More »

IPv6 deployment is accelerating at a fast pace. It’s exciting to see that the global IPv6 deployment figures show a continuing upward trend:

Cisco has been helping the Industry track this trend with our global deployment statistics portal: http://6lab.cisco.com/stats/. Go to the portal today and you can even follow @cisco6lab on Twitter.

We are also showcasing our IPv6 deployment adoption later this month at the annual Cisco Live Europe event in Milan. We are proud to announce that IPv6 content and demonstrations will be key features at our event from the show room floor to technical sessions, breakouts, panels, labs, and more. Read More »

Cisco Live Milan is around the corner and I’m getting my session, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to onePK, ready for it’s European debut. While it’s lovely to be in the CiscoLive Distinguished Speaker Hall of Fame, putting a good presentation together hasn’t gotten any easier. The hard questions still need to be asked: Do I have too many slides? Have I crossed the line between technical and boring? Will the demos work? Will anyone laugh at my jokes?

And perhaps most importantly for this session: does anyone read Douglas Adams any more?

Here’s why. I borrowed the title of Douglas Adam’s iconic Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for good reason. The original Hitchhiker’s Guide follows an ordinary guy, Arthur Dent, as he is unwillingly dragged into an intra-galactic adventure, with little more than the Guide, a pint of beer and a packet of peanuts to see him through. Faced with the vast and confusing world of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and programmability, network engineers are in a position to know exactly how Arthur Dent felt. New buzzwords, emerging standards, an abundance of marketing slides with vague but brightly colored blobs, and a lot of talk about programming languages can be disorienting to the best of us.

Notice that I did not call my session the Hitchhiker’s Guide to SDN. SDN calls for more of an Encyclopedia Galactica than a Hitchhiker’s Guide, if you know what I mean. Instead, my aim is to take a deep dive into one aspect of network programmability that network engineers can really relate to: onePK. Read More »

Autonomic Networking is well understood in theory, but real, consistent and extensible implementations don’t exist. In this post I suggest a reason for the lack in execution, and our vision to provide a working, implementable Autonomic Networking Architecture.

Wipe off the dust…

When asking a researcher about autonomic systems, (s)he might blow the dust off a stack of papers, or proudly pull a couple of old books off his shelf. Or point to IBM’s IEEE paper from 2003. From a research perspective, autonomics is well understood. It’s this self-management thing, with all those self-* properties. Self-configuration and self-optimisation for example. Distribution, control loops, and so on. Even the Wikipedia articles are written. So, we’re done, aren’t we?

No we’re not.

Ask your friendly neighbourhood network engineers about Autonomic Networking. The one that proudly hacks expect scripts at night to make his admin database talk to his routers. Or the front line engineer who applies a network service class to one of his customers. Likely, both of them would look at you with big eyes, and after explaining that the network manages itself, intelligently, you’d hear back: “That’s like Skynet, isn’t it?”

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